Public Garden, 16 Commerce Street: Anthony Pellino and his 1983 plan for an AIDS Memorial

This post is part of “Community Knowledge Practices,” a guest-edited portfolio by Theodore Kerr that documents conversations that reshape historical narratives by leveling the playing field between scholars, community members, and knowledge bearers. Read more about the portfolio here.

Introduction

In the edited transcript below, designer Anthony Pellino shares information about Public Garden, 16 Commerce Street, a park proposal he created as a student at The New School in 1983 that was designed to serve, in part, as an AIDS memorial. Less than two years into the U.S. response to the epidemic, Public Garden is currently the earliest known plan for an AIDS memorial in the world. It predates Cleve Jones’ NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt by two years, and the creation of the AIDS Memorial Garden in Houston by three years.

I met Pellino through Jenny Swadosh, Associate Archivist at The New School, where I teach a class on HIV and memorialization. Pellino’s student work is archived at The New School’s Archives and Special Collections, including digitized records of Public Garden.

The document below is divided into two parts, starting with a narrative about the project from Pellino, followed by an interview with Pellino and myself. Both parts were recorded in December 2023, a few weeks after Pellino visited my class, where students walked from the current New York City AIDS Memorial with Pellino to the original site for Public Garden.

Part 1

Anthony Pellino: As an undergraduate in the Environmental Design department at Parsons [School of Design, The New School], I was assigned along with my colleagues a project to find a neglected property or site in lower Manhattan and devise a design to make it, in some manner, useful.

At the time, I was still new to the West Village and I had spent the summer wandering around the crooked streets of the neighborhood, and became very familiar with them. It was a time when it was very clear many people were dying, and yet it was still a little neighborhood, filled with mom and pop–or pop and pop stores. In fact, the neighborhood was fairly vibrant, which I found surprising, even then, given what I was hearing in the media. There was a kind of normalcy in the West Village, generally speaking, among heterosexual couples of a certain socioeconomic level. They were pretty successful. They were living in a nice place. It was a pleasant area. There were amenities like restaurants and a certain amount of community interaction.

Because I was an undergraduate and in a student community, I was separated from the larger community of "adults" who were already living their lives, and living, I guess, as free and sexual people—and therefore were suffering the consequences of the disease, which nobody really understood. I think that as undergraduates, because of the focus and responsibilities, perhaps we might not have been quite as exposed to the disease. We had to do homework, we had to worry about getting a degree, and so it might not have been affecting us as much. Certainly there were other gay men in my class. To one degree or another, except for one very close friend, we were all "okay". Many years later, I met one of them at a meditation group and he was fine. And I think that's a great thing. Otherwise I don't know how many of us survived.

The thing that I keep focusing on for no particular reason, except that it probably does relate to the project, is that there was a little garden center at the corner of 10th Street and Hudson. The proprietor lived in a really small building at the west side of the property, part of which was the area where there was a cash register and a storefront. But adjacent to it was his dwelling, which was essentially one room and a bathroom, I guess, and maybe a kitchenette. He was gay. There was a certain part of the community that would go there on Saturday mornings and buy their gardening supplies. I would go there also. I later met a friend at GMHC [Gay Men's Health Crisis] who had dated this man. So I felt a real connection to the place. Not long thereafter the garden center was sold and the property was developed into a small residential building. But this gay proprietor and this garden center were emblematic for me of the sense of the "small village" that still existed until right around the time that I arrived. By the time I graduated from Parsons, a lot of this was gone.

Overlaid with this was a very clear understanding that the whole site was to be an AIDS memorial, in part because I could see some of the broad brush strokes of what was going on in the country at large with our president absolutely refusing to utter the word AIDS and trying to deny any kind of help for the gay community.

One other thing that was particularly upsetting was that at that time, New York state law permitted insurance companies to drop anyone from their health insurance for essentially any reason. What had happened was that whoever was able to maneuver this figured out that, well, if a person had been treated for an STD [sexually transmitted disease] and they were a single man, there was a good chance that they were gay. And so if you had had an STD, off you went without health insurance. Pre-existing conditions… so if you found yourself without health insurance and you realized you were sick, too bad, no health insurance. And in addition to this, Medicaid, I believe, had a lifetime cap of $250,000 worth of coverage, and even at that time, that wasn't an enormous amount of money for medical care. So once that was used up, who knew? It left me feeling quite vulnerable, and I don't know if I articulated it to myself at the time, but certainly by the time marriage equality became an issue, I did recognize that gay people were essentially not being treated as equal citizens. So I felt that it was reasonable and appropriate to dedicate this site to an AIDS memorial, not as an overt in your face political act, but as a quieter one.

A student [from your class] asked about how Parsons / The New School addressed the explicit discussion of AIDS in the classroom, and I answered it more or less like this: the instructors at that time, apparently because of tradition, but also I think because of their own, let's just say issues, typically were pretty abusive in reviewing projects, both on an individual, three-times-a-week basis and also at design reviews. But with this one, they weren't. Perhaps because it was reasonably well thought out, perhaps because it was reasonably well-documented. But I tend to suspect that it was because they didn't dare "go there" with this particular project. And for that, I guess I'm actually... I have a little bit of respect for that. They knew when to—well, they didn't usually know when to stop, but in this case, they knew when to stop. And I don't remember specifically, but I suppose I had a certain amount of trepidation getting up in front... of—not my colleagues, because they were my peers, many of whom, as I've mentioned, were gay. No one was particularly in the closet in that context at Parsons at that time, or not in my class, I should say… But I wasn't particularly comfortable with being particularly open with them, given the way the instructors generally treated us. So I imagine it took a certain amount of courage, but I did it. I mean, in one way or the other, I said what I needed to say, and the project was received in a reasonably polite manner, a reasonably professional manner. And I think that was great all around. I guess I have to say, I'm glad for that.

The last thing I want to say is being young and an undergraduate and not really in the adult community, I didn't experience a bunch of my friends dropping off, but I did have some experiences. One of them I'd like to memorialize is about a person I had met by going up to the gay student group at Columbia. I was a fairly active member there, and I had met a young man through friends, and three weeks later I was having lunch with those two friends, and one of them announced that the young man I had just met had been diagnosed and had died within that period of time. That was the kind of atmosphere we were living in—plus no government support, plus health insurance being denied to the suffering. All these years later, I hadn't thought that this small project was particularly significant in any way. But I've since read a little bit of [Carl] Jung and I am caught up with this idea of the subtle self and how the future self can inform the past self, how the past self can inform the future self. Do I believe this? I'm not sure. I just find it extremely intriguing. I was not a particularly wise undergraduate. I'm not claiming to be, but I think that the sensitivity of this project, which wasn't necessarily typical of me at that time… I wonder, was this informed by a future self? Maybe.

TK: That's beautiful. As you say those words out loud: allow people to rise up again.

Obviously a lot of your design is motivated by the shape of the space, and obviously your plan was before the New York AIDS Memorial was built,³ and Silence = Death,⁴ yet I can't help but recognize a triangle. I wonder if that hit you back then or if that hits you now is noteworthy.

AP: Well, for sure. The pink triangle was very, very much in my mind at this point. Around this time The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals by Richard Plant came out. So the pink triangle was very, very much on my mind. Now, again, I remember this sort of neutral palette of the hardscape of this project. It was not intended to be painted pink, but I will say many years later when I was working with the Leslie Lohman Gay Art Foundation⁵, we had done some, well, we had done an extensive renovation of their original site, and it involved using a bright pink substance to help plaster adhere to the central columns. And the founder, one of the founders, came in one day and saw this stuff on the columns and looked at me and said, "well, do you think we can paint the columns that color?" And that's what the columns became. Bright pink.

TK: Public Garden, 16 Commerce Street is three things: A quiet place; through the map, a public wayfinding amenity; and then an AIDS memorial. How do those three things being together make you feel either in relationship to your past experience or even a desire that you might have for a place now?

AP: I am glad of it, and I think that's what art, in my opinion, aims to do. It aims to be complex and multifaceted because humans are complex and multifaceted. It was very, very difficult to work in that way in those years because I certainly didn't have enough training to overlay ideas. I always wanted to incorporate many ideas into my projects from the very beginning at Parsons, but I was not of that world. I had never been exposed to this kind of thing in a 3D expression, so I really didn't know how to wield them. I am quite certain that in most cases I didn't really succeed. But I think in this case I did.

TK : For you, what were some monuments or memorials that you can remember were meaningful for you at the time, if any?

AP: I don't remember if I had seen it before or after this project. I suspect it was afterward, but I had seen the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, which I knew about from pictures, but wasn't prepared for as an in-person experience.⁶ What I didn't know was that the polished granite reflected our images as we visited and superimposed us, as living people, onto the names of the dead. Aside from the fact that the physical experience is actually one of descent and then ascent—so gravity is definitely operating on your body—but then there's this intensely, literally reflective, but also emotionally reflective aspect to it. It was really quite moving.

TK: What about gardens as memorial site or monument site? Is that something that you remember understanding or having an experience of at that time?

AP: Oh, I don't know if that is a simple question for me. I was raised in Westchester, a place which had a really—to use the word profound is not even enough—impact on how I see the world and approach design. It was designed or developed mainly in the early 1890s through maybe the 1920s. By the time I came around, everything was a memorial. Every garden around every house was nearly a hundred years old. So almost everything that I encountered was built by people who really cared about their physical environment and were long gone.

TK: The first AIDS Memorial Garden doesn't come until 1986 in Houston, and it is not a well-known place.⁷ The AIDS quilt, the idea is seeding in 1985, became a thing in the period between 1985–87.⁸ So I wonder for you, was this idea of memorial or monument or memorialization and AIDS already circulating in your world and in this village neighborhood that you were in? Or at The New School or in New York?

AP: Well, we have the problem of memory. Is my memory faulty to answer that? And so, this may or may not be accurate. On the one hand, we had the crisis of real horror. And on the other hand, I think it would be fair to say something like, we've got to honor and respect the people who are suffering. So I don't think that anyone was necessarily saying, put up a big granite slab or build a park. But I think that people were very clear that what was going on deserved a response, support, whatever was possible at that time. I mean, I realized medically that there were tremendous challenges, but I think that people were not cowering away and saying, oh my God, we brought it on ourselves, or whatever. They were saying, this is a Holocaust and we need to respect it.

TK: This is a two part question: how were you finding out information about the crisis? How were you finding solace or care or community?

AP: Oh, well, finding out about the crisis, I was certainly looking at newspapers regularly, The Village Voice, probably less regularly, The New York Times.

TK: What about The Native?⁹

AP: No. I lived very close to Christopher Street, but I arrived after Christopher Street really became quite subdued. So I kind of knew that there was an absence that was pretty clear. You could intuit it. I knew a number of older gay men. I had worked for a store that was run by a gay couple, so I kind of heard what was going on among their crowd. There was a big antique shop on Hudson Street right near the store where I worked, and all the men who worked there were gay. All the hangers on were gay. I was kind of aware of what was going on in their lives, which was quite something. So I had a connection. On the other hand, as I've said, I was an undergraduate, and in my particular case, I was quite focused on the responsibilities of trying to earn a degree. So I was really caught up in that, and I think painful as it was, it did provide a kind of support or a kind of respite because at least in my head, I didn't quite have to worry about all the adult kinds of things that these older guys I knew were going through.

TK: What do you mean by adult things?

AP: Well, having to pay for your own health insurance is one good example. I mean, I distinctly remember one man on whom I had a crush talking about basically the way his partners abused him. I thought, oh my God, I really didn't know what to make of it, but I didn't have that to worry about, for example. I had to worry more about how do I build a life here? Where do I find friends? How do I live in this era, essentially? Because to be honest, the eighties is an era which still confuses me. We didn't have the Summer of Love, for example. We didn't have a distinct category of people like hippies. I mean, it was—what the heck was going on? You look back and you see these various emblematic personalities or events and you realize it's a very rich period, but it's not clear to me at least what are the main themes of this other than AIDS?

TK: At that time you were thinking that, or that's what you look back and think?

AP: I think I was generally kind of trying to make sense of it all, but AIDS and earning a degree were very much the things that were on my mind.

TK: What about a boyfriend or relationship or sex?

AP: I was exploring and trying to understand that too, not necessarily with a great deal of finesse. I did end up with a boyfriend from Columbia [University] . We had met through the student group there and just sort of—well, actually I'd had another boyfriend before that whom I met through the store I worked at. And he was much older, and that was another sort of source of information. But he, like so many people, had his own issues and not necessarily... he was not necessarily a great role model there.

TK: Negotiating that stuff is always hard when you're young, and then it doesn't make it easier when there's an epidemic. Did it affect how you understood yourself as a social person, as a dating person?

AP: Absolutely. I mean, I was so afraid that any encounter, any intimate encounter was going to put me in a box, certainly. But I mean, that potential existed, but also that I would end up in this horrible limbo of, Oh, he got an STD, now he doesn't have health insurance. And then he's sick, and then he's suffering in the way that so many suffered Kaposi sarcoma and horrible pneumonia. Of course, there was the anxiety of my parents finding out that I was gay, which many of us suffered from, and the society at large wasn't super supportive, starting with the president. So you're sitting there trying to negotiate all these anxieties. Of course, that affects intimacy. I think I may have said this to you before: one of the big themes of recent years—I sometimes write fiction—one of the big themes in that fiction is how AIDS affected gay men's ability to be intimate. And I don't know if that's true of other generations, but I am pretty sure it had a big effect on mine.

TK : Absolutely. And yet, when I look at the space that you made, it is a space for encounter and intimacy. Imagine if that day you presented it, they were like, actually, it just so happens we have permission and we're going to build it. Can you imagine the life of this park if it had been able to come into physical fruition?

AP: I can imagine it. I'm not sure it would've turned out quite in the pristine manner, the pristine existence that I pictured for it, probably not. As I look at it, I don't think I knew about Tadao Ando at that time.¹⁰ But as I've mentioned, at least in the case of the sun screen, but really of all the elements that I would've introduced, it was all supposed to be poured concrete, not necessarily hard or cold. I mean, just monolithic, I think was the idea. Now I know what Tadao Ando's spaces are like. And it would've at least initially been very quiet, I don't want to say zen, because that's such a cliche, but it would've been a tranquil, neutral space, I think.

TK: I think it also would've been, obviously, it would've been a quiet place, a place for wayfinding, a place for memorials. It also would've been maybe a cruising place or a place for homeless people to hang out or a place for office workers to eat lunch.

When did you first encounter an AIDS memorial?

AP: The one that I distinctly remember was going to Washington when the AIDS quilt was laid out on The Mall.¹¹ For anyone who has not experienced that, it was jaw dropping because it was so enormous. I don't know the statistics, but I walked it and it was gigantic. When you think of how the panels were, whether they were three feet by seven feet or something, they were arranged, I believe in groups of four or eight, but probably eight. So you had a big square that was, let's say, 14 by 14 feet, separated by a textile walkway. So the whole thing was one continuous surface of fabric. The individual memorial panels were this three or three and a half by seven foot proportion arranged in these groups of eight. So squares, then separated by these walkways on all four sides of that square. And this thing extending for who knows how many acres. I mean, you could just keep walking and walking and walking. I am not even sure I was fully aware of what it meant that each individual little rectangle multiplied by this amount of area meant this number of people. But I knew how big it was. I knew how serious it was.

TK: If you were to make an AIDS memorial today, what do you think you would make? What would it look like? What would it feel like? Where would it be? What would you use?

AP: This is not an easy question to raise with someone with my background. I am pretty well trained, and you don't answer a question of that magnitude off the cuff.

TK: Very fair, duly noted. You do lots of things now. I want to talk about your work at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, because a thread throughout your life from Westchester to Public Garden is that the dead are with us.

AP: At Woodlawn, I specialize in architecture, decorative arts, and to some degree sculpture at the cemetery. I've always seen the connection between the built environment and the people, A, who built it, and B, who inhabited it. I think that this is a lot of what drives my interest in the field.

In fact, not to get too deeply into it, but on one side of my family were artisans, people who actually fabricated carving or masonry or iron work. And so I knew to one degree or another, the people who've fabricated the kinds of things that we find at Woodlawn—certainly none of my relatives, to my knowledge, ever actually produced anything there. But biography is deeply intertwined with all of this.

So although my primary interest is what makes the memorials impactful, it's impossible to separate that from the personalities who commissioned them or who designed them or who fabricated them. Many times this is difficult because there isn't a lot of historical record for the people there, even if they were relatively well to do. Very often there will be a fairly interesting memorial and there will be two paragraphs or even a one paragraph obituary in the Times, and that's kind of it. And that's usually the man of a male-female couple. Often there's practically nothing about the lady. That's really difficult because oftentimes the lady is the one who is suddenly widowed and tasked with commissioning a memorial. So it's tantalizing and there's something there, but you just don't know in any way what that is.

And then on the other hand, there are people for whom there is a tremendous amount of information, and that makes it far easier and more interesting simply because there's just much more information to use. We have Samuel Untermyer who was a prominent attorney during the Progressive Era. We know a ton about him. He was very, very well off. And he was able to commission one of the largest sites at the cemetery, which incorporates landscape, architecture to some degree, although the designer was not an architect. And he was able to incorporate a sculptural group commissioned by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Now the designer was Paul Chalfin of, among other things, [Villa] Vizcaya.

So we have this confluence of personalities, two of whom were pretty major figures in culture. Not to mention the fact that Mr. Untermeyer commissioned the memorial after the death of his wife Minnie, who was responsible for bringing Gustav Mahler to the New York Philharmonic, for example. So it's a really culturally rich environment. Plus this was commissioned in 1924, which is exactly on the cusp of the great introduction of Art Deco style into the world in 1925, and we have documents, drawings from Chalfin that transformed the design of the memorial from a relatively classical idea into an Art Deco one just at this point. So all these things are coming together. And would it be there, had Samuel Untermeyer not had the means? No. Would it have been there if Minnie Untermeyer hadn't died in 1924? No. So all these things are really, really important. Even though they're gone, and I have to be honest, I feel somehow a responsibility to remember all of these people, whether they're modest or not, but it's easier to know about the grander ones. So we have all of this and we have the traces that they left. We have this large manifestation of their intentions and their thoughts and their hopes, and no doubt, their compromises and grief. I don't mean just grief in terms of the loss of a spouse, but also the grief of how difficult it is to create something like this. I find this all of a piece. It's design, but it's emotion.

Anyway, I'm very moved by it and that's what keeps me studying.

Anthony Pellino is a New York State Certified Interior Designer. He is NCIDQ Certified and an ASID Professional. He practices interior design in New York City with a specialty in furniture design. He holds a BFA in Environmental Design from Parsons and a Master of Architecture from the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia University. In addition to design and teaching, he creates public programming in historic architecture and design for the National Historic Landmark Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, NY.

Theodore (ted) Kerr is an educator, writer, and organizer. He is the co-author of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2022, with Alexandra Juhasz). He curated the 2021 exhibition AIDS, Posters and Stories of Public Health: A People's Pandemic for the National Libraries of Medicine. He was one of 4 oral historians who worked on Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project for the Smithsonian, Archives for American Art in 2017 / 2018. In 2019, he edited "What You Don’t Know about AIDS Could Fill A Museum," an issue of the On Curating journal, and in 2014, he edited "Time Is Not A Line," a journal issue for Carlos Motta's project, We Who Feel Differently. Kerr is a founding member of What Would an HIV Doula Do